No one does it alone

“As soon as we got into the school, the principal was calling the roll. He said, ‘Bill Weaver,’ and I said, ‘My name is William.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you’re a smart N-word.’ I’d been in school maybe 30 minutes and he suspended me,” Weaver, 67, says, while recounting his first day at school during a recent visit to StoryCorps.

Weaver, who is now the chief of surgery at Fayetteville VA Medical Center in North Carolina, says he doesn’t remember a day that a teacher didn’t tell him that he “didn’t belong.”